Sunday, May 24, 2009

Reduce IDE clutter with Mylyn

One of the problems with working on a large project in Eclipse (or in any IDE) is navigating through various project resources (e.g., classes, methods, and etc..). Mylyn, a Eclipse feature, attempts to solve this problem by providing a focused view that shows only the relevant resources for a given task:

Skip the first 4 section because the speaker blathers on and on about various impediments to a software developer's productivity. Begin at section 5 and watch until you get bored (~30 minutes).

Key features of Mylyn include:

Integrated view with ticket issue tracker software such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA. Issues assigned to you are downloaded into the Eclipse project so that they can be viewed offline without the delay of launching a browser and waiting for a page load.

As you work on an issue, Mylyn tracks your visits to classes, methods, and resources to create a task context. You can upload the task context to share with other developers who would be able to view the classes, methods, and resources relevant to the ticket issue.

Bug numbers inlined in code comments can be clicked to bring the ticket issue into view.

In other words, Mylyn integrates Eclipse with your issue tracker so that only the relevant project resources are visible at any given time.

Ego (aka About Me)

I am a software developer with about 6 years of experience in various roles such as a university researcher, independent consultant, and enterprise developer.

My criteria for good software code can be reduced to a single axiom: Good code is easily testable code. This is based on my belief that software code are ultimately theories of how a business process should work. And it is well-accepted in the scientific community that good theories are testable theories. So, good code is testable code.

I hate the word "enterprise" even though I use it quite a bit.

This blog is written for the sole purpose of shameless self-promotion. :)